The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s bold new campaign to expose the rampant anti-Semitism and dangerous, genocidal rhetoric of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and their student supporters across the nation is officially underway.

The posters are coming soon to many more college and university campuses across the country.

To bolster the campaign, the Freedom Center will be debuting a powerful new pamphlet by Sara Dogan titled SJP: Neo-Nazis on Campus, as well as publicizing the effort at its Stop University Support for Terrorists website.

This groundbreaking investigative report examines how anti-Israel activists affiliated with SJP, MSA, and likeminded groups are using social media to praise Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, urge an intifada-style uprising in the U.S., and call for a second Holocaust to exterminate the Jews. The same people also smear Israel, describing Jews as “colonial-settler” occupiers of a nonexistent state called “Palestine,” while calling Israel an “apartheid state” even though it is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and a staunch U.S. ally.

The profiles in the pamphlet—which were assembled using carefully documented references from the Canary Mission, a nonprofit group dedicated to cataloguing hatred across the political spectrum— showcase the statements, actions and motivations of 10 of the most ardent neo-Nazis leading the campus war against Israel.

Among the statements made by SJP and MSA supporters that appear in both the pamphlet and posters are:

“How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough.”

“Wow White Jews are so entitled LMFAOOO Please die.”

“Hitler had a lot of great ideas. We need a guy like that in the White House.”

“Had to write about a leader for DCL class. Wrote about Hitler. Cuz he’s a boss.”

The Freedom Center pamphlet and posters also expose UC Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of SJP, as an anti-Semite and supporter of the anti-Israel terrorist group HAMAS.

Bazian has shared anti-Semitic memes on social media, including a Twitter post depicting a caricature of an Orthodox Jew with the caption, “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI[.]”

Bazian helped to found SJP to wage a campus-based war against Israel on behalf of HAMAS by stigmatizing those who support Israel, as well as creating a climate of hatred towards Jews and Israel supporters.

Bazian is chairman of the board of the related hate group, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and is on record calling for the destruction of the Jewish state and its Jewish inhabitants. Of course, Bazian strenuously denies that he hates Jews. The charge of “anti-Semitism is used as a means of neutralizing the opposition so the mainstream American public will distance itself from the ‘extremists,’” he has said.

HAMAS funnels money to campus radicals through AMP. That funding has helped to make SJP the principal collegiate organization in the HAMAS terror network and its campus-based propaganda effort. SJP vigorously supports the HAMAS-endorsed and financed Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign that can be considered a form of economic terrorism aimed at undermining, delegitimizing, and eventually destroying the Jewish state.

It needs to be noted that the HAMAS founding charter refers to “the Nazism of the Jews” and claims that “Islam will obliterate it [i.e. Israel], just as it obliterated others before it.” The document declares that peace initiatives “are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement”; that “there is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad”; and that “war for the sake of Allah” is a noble enterprise that requires the faithful to “assault and kill” on an immense scale.

In 2009, Bazian founded and became director of the Center for the Study and Documentation of Islamophobia, which is part of UC Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender. He is editor-in-chief of the Islamophobia Studies Journal which he founded.It isn’t at all surprising that SJP and MSA refuse to condemn HAMAS because both groups were created by the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization known for translating Mein Kampf into Arabic and whose leader, Hassan al-Banna, was an open admirer of Hitler who launched the Islamic-Palestinian movement to “push the Jews into the sea.”

The Freedom Center’s new poster campaign attempts to expose SJP and MSA activists as promoters of a neo-Nazi ideology and supporters of anti-Israel terrorism so America’s students can learn for themselves the disturbing full implications of backing these hateful anti-Israeli, anti-American groups.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

March for Our Lives and the school walkout isn’t about gun violence; it’s about indoctrination.

And there’s no age limit.

Sixteen years ago, David Horowitz and the Freedom Center unveiled the Academic Bill of Rights to protect intellectual diversity on college campuses. But now the same indoctrination and intolerance urgently demand that the Freedom Center step in to protect K-12 students from political abuse.

The ugly scenes from the student walkout haunt our screens as the classroom organizers of the left work to turn students into the latest anti-American protest movement after Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

In Minneapolis, a student carrying a Trump flag was violently attacked outside a high school where a walkout was taking place. In Tennessee, students tore down an American flag and jumped on a police car. These ugly scenes from the latest cultural revolution are the work of activists posing as teachers.

It’s not just high school students being dragged out to protest against the Bill of Rights. Elementary school students are the next frontier for exploitative organizers. Even kindergarteners aren’t off limits.

The Wall Street Journal reports that schools are “finding ways for children who are too little to be told about school shootings to take part.”

And teachers who offer more than one perspective on the protests are being punished.

In Rocklin, California, a high school history teacher who asked students to discuss whether it’s appropriate for schools to support this protest over other protests, was told not to come in the next day.

“And so I just kind of used the example which I know it’s really controversial, but I know it was the best example I thought of at the time—a group of students nationwide, or even locally, decided ‘I want to walk out of school for 17 minutes and go in the quad area and protest abortion, would that be allowed by our administration?” Mrs. Benzel asked. In response, the school put her on administrative leave.

Mrs. Benzel’s question touched a nerve. All protests are not created equal. Parkland survivors who wouldn’t push gun control were smeared or silenced. And those teachers and administrations who have questioned the educational legitimacy of the protests are facing threats to their careers.

The K-12 Code of Ethics protects students from classroom indoctrination and shields teachers from being pressured into indoctrinating students. “Education in a democracy is best served by teaching students how to think, not telling them what to think,” the Code of Ethics cautions.

When schools push kindergarteners to protest the Second Amendment and when teachers who try to protect the integrity of critical thinking in education are punished for it, the consequences threaten the civic mission of education. Classroom indoctrination hijacks democracy at the source by manipulating the minds of future citizens when they are at their youngest, most trusting, and most vulnerable.

Education and activism are at odds with each other. Education teaches students to use what they learn to ask their own questions, while activism hands them the questions and the only acceptable answers. Activism doesn’t seek to educate, but to indoctrinate. It rewards political compliance, no matter how ignorant or uninformed, while punishing dissent, no matter how enlightened or true.

Democratic education teaches that there is more than one point of view. But the classrooms of the country are being hijacked by an activist left whose endgame is not democracy, but tyranny.

The school protests exploit children as political props while indoctrinating them into projecting their fear and anger, their insecurities and worries into political activism. And it doesn’t begin or end with gun control. The radical left sees the classroom as a community organizing forum. The children placed in its care are just more fresh meat to be organized, indoctrinated, and deployed to fight in its political wars.

That’s what the children marching against the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights are.

The K-12 Code of Ethics prevents public school teachers from using the classroom to push political candidates, legislation, court cases, or any pending political matter. The code protects students from being exploited in political campaigns like March for Our Lives. It turns the classroom away from indoctrination and toward education. And restores education’s proper role in our political system.

It is not the job of the educational system to tell students what to think about controversial issues, but to enable them to examine the different sides of an issue before making up their minds. That’s what Mrs. Benzel tried to do. But when classroom organizers replace teachers, thinking is not allowed.

The national walkout shows us what the future of education under the organizers would look like. There will be more protests than learning. Tests, classroom discussions, and all forms of assessment will measure political opinions, not skills. Teachers will organize students around causes rather than ideas.

The same process that operated at the college level when the Academic Bill of Rights was born will be embedded into the system at the kindergarten level. There are already efforts to force identity politics into elementary school and even kindergarten. The George Lucas Educational Foundation speaks of indoctrinating children as young as three.

The shameful attempts at indoctrinating children rob them of their innocence. And teach them to turn against their parents by rejecting their values. Leftists always fight their battles with other people’s kids.

The K-12 Code of Ethics draws a line in the sand.

Classroom organizers will attack the K-12 Code with the same arguments that were used against the Academic Bill of Rights. But we’ve heard those arguments. And we know where they come from.

"We say that our work in the sphere of education is part of the struggle for overthrowing the bourgeoisie. We publicly declare that education divorced from life and politics is lies and hypocrisy," Vladimir Lenin declared.

Our educational system is not meant to overthrow, but to preserve. It is not a vehicle for winning partisan battles. And our children are in school to be taught, not organized into angry mobs.

The K-12 Code of Ethics calls for legislators to set “clear regulations and enforcement mechanisms for appropriate professional and ethical behavior by teachers.” The only figures opposed to it are radicals who wish to perpetuate the unprofessional and unethical behavior that we saw with the walkout.

If we want to put an end to the ugly walkout scenes that we witnessed, we need to support the K-12 Code of Ethics and drain the educational swamp before it swallows up our children’s minds.

California senate boss Kevin de Leon has appointed Lizbeth Mateo, 33, an “immigrant rights activist,” to the California Student Opportunity and Access Program Project Grant Advisory Committee. There the attorney and “immigrant rights activist,” becomes the first “undocumented” resident to occupy a statewide post.

“I hope this is just the beginning of more undocumented people having access to places we’re usually not accepted into,” Mateo told reporters. Her appointment confirms the dialectic of what one might call Mexi-Marxism.

In the antithesis, as stated by Kevin de Leon and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon after Trump’s 2016 election victory, “California was not a part of this nation when its history began, but we are clearly now the keeper of its future.” And as Rendon proclaims, “there is no sensible place for barriers between California and Mexico.”

In this default view, Mexicans are only visiting the northern part of their own country, and not illegally entering the United States. They are therefore entitled to U.S. education, medical care, drivers’ licenses, welfare, and in-state college tuition, duly granted to Mexican national Lizbeth Mateo, who entered the country illegally at age 14.

In the antithesis, U.S. law does not prevail and the Democrat party, effectively a division of Mexico’s ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional, overrides the rule of law in general. Governor Jerry Brown is on board with it, and in his first ride as governor he appointed as welfare boss Mario Obledo, a bigot who said California was going to be an “Hispanic state” and those who didn’t like it should leave and “go back to Europe.”

Brown opposed Proposition 209, and the state PRI collaborators deploy “diversity” bureaucrats to get around it. In defiance of 209 and federal immigration law, UC boss Janet Napolitano works three shifts to fund programs specifically for false-documented illegals.

The illegals vote in massive numbers but Secretary of State Alex Padilla refuses to release the data. After the election of Donald Trump, the synthesis took things to a new level, but entirely consistent with the dialectic.

In standard Marxism, socialism is replacing capitalism. In Mexi-Marxism, Mexicans are replacing Americans, as in the appointment of Lizbeth Mateo. In that office, de Leon explains, she would “fight for those seeking their rightful place in this country.” So in her view Mexican nationals’ “right” to enter the USA overrides US immigration law.

De Leon wants to replace Dianne Feinstein in the U.S. Senate but has already advanced reasons why this might be troublesome. After the Trump victory, he went on record that half his family used fake documents and would be eligible for deportation.

“The name on his birth certificate isn’t Kevin de León,” explains a hagiographical piece by Christopher Cadelago in the Sacramento Bee. The name on the birth certificate and voter rolls is Kevin Alexander Leon, and he claims his father Andres was a Chinese cook born in Guatemala, same as his mother Carmen Osorio. De Leon grew up on both sides of the border but “identifies strongly with Mexican culture.”

This far-fetched story might prompt federal sleuths to run a thorough background check. The possibility of a Mexican replacing an American in the U.S. senate could prove troubling to legitimate citizens and legal immigrants alike. They might note that last year Larissa Waters resigned from the Australian senate when it emerged that she was born in Canada, and under Australian law barred from running for parliament.

In a country where the rule of law prevails, Lizbeth Mateo would be deported to her rightful homeland. In her native Mexico, the eager attorney could represent families of the students murdered and kidnapped in 2014 as they headed for a protest of the Tlatelolco Massacre.

In this new video, Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer explains why Christian communities that have existed in the Middle East since the time of Christ have in recent years been attacked, and in many cases obliterated, by Islamic jihadis. Why are the jihadis attacking the Christians now? Spencer reveals the shocking reason.

On March 14, I attended a public presentation entitled Islam 101 at Golden West Collegein Huntington Beach, California. The presenter was Nicole Bovey, a convert to Islam and public information officer at the Islamic Institute of Orange County in Anaheim. Bovey also works with the Muslim Speakers Bureau in Orange County (an arm of the Islamic Networks Group). The presentation was sponsored by GWC professors Kaine Fini (Anthropology) and Communications Professor Kristine Clancy (most of the audience members were her students, and this was part of her class.) The event had been advertised publicly, hence was open to the public. Altogether, there were approximately 50 people present. I videotaped the entire proceeding. The event was scheduled to run from 6:45-9:30 pm. As it was, it was cut off at about 8:30 by one of the professors (more about that later.) During the event, Professor Clancy called in campus police and she admonished a couple of the people in the audience who had asked pointed questions.

Ms. Bovey's presentation was a very basic and very vanilla presentation of Islam, explaining what Islam is, what it means, who Muslims are, Muslims' worldwide demographic breakdown etc. Bovey's lesson plan, consisting of slides posted on the walls, was about subjects like the 5 pillars of Islam, daily prayers etc. She stated at the outset that she was there to clear up misconceptions about Islam. In fact, the first image on the wall was of a masked man representing a terrorist. Yet, it was clear later into the presentation that she was not going to get into areas like terrorism or Sharia law. She invited the audience members to raise their hands to ask questions at any point.

Bovey was doing fine handling soft, non-controversial questions, but plainly could not handle pointed, uncomfortable questions from a few members of the audience, including myself. One audience member identified himself as a former Muslim from Egypt, who left Islam and became a Christian pastor. When he began to contradict statements by Bovey, she became uncomfortable. Subsequently, he was approached by Prof. Clancy who asked him to step outside. He returned a few minutes later. While Bovey was discussing Zakat (Islamic charity giving), another audience member asked her about the categories of Zakat and whether any of them allowed giving to non-Muslims. She was unable to answer the question. Another man in the audience, a Muslim, stated that there was a separate channel of giving other than Zakat that could be directed to non-Muslims.

During Bovey's description of Islamic daily prayers, I asked her about Sura 1, verses 1-7, from the Quran, which are recited in those daily prayers. I read verses 6-7 to her from an English language Koran that referred to those who had incurred Allah's wrath and those who had lost their way. I mentioned that according to a hadith, one of Mohammad's followers had asked who that referred to and Mohammad's answer was that the former were the Jews and the latter Christians. Bovey danced all around it stating that she didn't know about that and that she had her own perception of who those people might be.

At one point, Bovey called for a 15-20 minute break because she and her AV assistant had to pray. At that point I turned my camera off and was looking at my cell phone when Professor Clancy began admonishing a couple of the men in the audience who had asked the above questions stating that this was her class. A campus police officer entered the room and a third staff member, International Student Program Director Melissa Lyon, asked a couple of them to step outside. One of the men had not even asked a question and eventually he was able to avoid going outside to talk to police. I captured most of this on my cell phone both inside the hall and outside. After talking with the police, the men were allowed to return.

Later on, Yet another audience member pointed out that modern archaeological studies had failed to identify Mecca as even existing during the time Mohammad was alive. Again, Bovey was unprepared. Professor Fini identified himself as an anthropological professor and responded that there were historical sites associated with Judaism and Christianity which could not be proven to exist during certain times, but that they were accepted as part of tradition.

I was called on for another question and asked Bovey about Hudud Sharia, the punishment section of Sharia law, specifically about the death penalty for apostates who criticized Islam, adulterers and homosexuals. Again her answer was evasive. She then asked me to stop videotaping saying that she feared I would edit it. I assured her I would not. I politely insisted that this was a public event in a public institution and that I had a right to videotape. This was affirmed by the aforementioned anthropology professor. (During the break I had occasion to talk to a campus police officer, and he affirmed my right to videotape.)

As other questioners steered the topic toward sensitive areas, Professor Lyon came racing to the rescue ending the event one hour before its scheduled time. It was pretty obvious that the conversation was going in a direction that Bovey and the professors did not want it to go.

It is clear that Bovey came prepared to give a "happy face" version of Islam to her audience. She was not prepared to deal with the obvious elephants in the room. Virtually every critical question was met with evasion.

Professors Clancy and Lyon completely overreacted to the questions to the point of calling in the campus cops and asking audience members to step outside. Whatever happened to free speech and the free exchange of ideas? There was absolutely no disruption whatsoever. Yet members of the audience were told that their questions were unacceptable. Since when?

And why did Ms. Lyon stop the event 60 minutes early? Because the speaker and her hosts were unwilling to engage in a discussion of aspects of Islam like Sharia law, draconian punishments, and terrorism.

Though the audience was mostly students and mostly members of Professor Clancy's class, we (the aforementioned questioners) were not the only non-students in the audience. This event was announced to the public. That some chose to come and ask honest questions about Islam should be part of the protocol. Is that not what colleges are supposed to be engaged in? It was stated that Bovey wanted to explain "misconceptions" about Islam. Yet when asked to do so, she gave us tap dances and evasions while the professors tried to silence some of us -- and then called the campus police to shut us down. Again, this was an event open to the public.

It is evident that all of these eerie developments clearly were a perfect lesson in Islam 101 -- and in which happens to a free society once Sharia starts taking over.

Will we accept this laying down?

TAKE ACTION FOR FREE SPEECH:

[1] The president of Golden West College is Wes Bryan. Contact him and ask why his institution is submitting to Islamic blasphemy laws:
Email: wbryan@gwc.cccd.edu.
Phone #: 714 895 8101.

[2] Golden West College is part of the Coast Community College District. They have a board of regents whose contact info can be found HERE.

[3] One of the audience members who was escorted out of this event by police and warned by them not to ask any more questions was Steve Amundson, the head of the Counter Jihad Coalition. Contact him if you want to help defend America from Jihad and Sharia:
Email: counterjihadcoalition@gmail.com.

Avi Jorisch and I met at the AIPAC conference. He was a panelist at an exciting forum titled “The Israeli Ethos,” dealing with Israeli technologies, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Jorisch is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, and author of Thou Shalt Innovate. We discussed what is it about Israel that nurtures entrepreneurship and innovation -- and how Israeli innovation has impacted the world.

Joseph Puder (JP): Tell our readers where you come from and what motivated you to write Thou Shalt Innovate?

Avi Jorisch (AJ): I was born into a family of Holocaust survivors and raised primarily in New York City. But I also lived in Israel for long stretches of my childhood, through my teenage years and into adulthood, because of my family’s cultural, historical, and religious ties there.

My interest in Israeli technology was kindled during the summer of 2014, when my family and I lived through Operation Protective Edge, in large part going in and out of bomb shelters. My family, like the rest of Israel, found comfort in the Iron Dome. I marveled at this invention. It kept Israel from descending into the chaos and carnage that was engulfing the rest of the Middle East.

I realized that the Iron Dome was not the only Israeli innovation saving lives. Almost by chance, I began to notice the other innovations around me that were making a real difference in fostering a kinder, gentler world. After every crisis — whether it was a rocket that came crashing down, a traffic accident, or a random heart attack — almost immediately an emergency responder appeared riding on a kind of half ambulance, half motorcycle — an “ambucycle” — which was dispatched using an Uber-like smartphone app. My Jerusalem gardener pointed out that he used a special dripper, which I soon learned was being used by farmers all over the world to conserve one of our most important resources — water — and feed our growing world population. One of my colleagues was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and began undergoing deep brain stimulation to help with his symptoms. I learned that the device being used had been designed by Imad and Reem Younis, an Arab couple from Nazareth. Their innovation has revolutionized brain surgery through a GPS-like system that allows surgeons to treat all kinds of movement and psychiatric disorders by inserting an electrode into the exact part of the brain requiring stimulation.

These stories were like small rays of hope cutting through the darkness I felt was overtaking the region. I wanted to connect with this inspirational side of Israel. I began to deliberately seek out social innovators who were working on challenges — small and large — and were making life better for millions, if not billions, of people around the world

JP: What is it about Israel that nurtures entrepreneurship and innovation?

AJ: There are many reasons why Israel is such a technological powerhouse. Chutzpah, obligatory military service, renowned universities and smart big government — alongside a diverse population and a dearth of natural resources, go a long way in explaining how a country the size of New Jersey is so innovative. But as I show in my book, these reasons only partially explain the story. They do not explain why so many Israeli tech companies, rather than simply trying to make money or making our lives more convenient, also wind up making the world a better place. But you can’t understand Israel if you don’t also look at the country’s culture.

After hundreds of interviews, I have come to believe that Israel’s desire to repair the world is part of a host of Jewish values. Since the Middle Ages and possibly before, Jews have recited the aleinu prayer three times a day, which instructs us to repair the world. Pirkei Avot, or Chapters of the Fathers, a collection of ethical teachings compiled around the second century CE, encourage­s people to help others. And the prophet Isaiah instructed the children of Israel to act as a light unto the nations. Israel’s founding fathers, chief among them David Ben Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, were inspired by these religious teachings. And today, these powerful ideas are woven into the fabric of Israeli society, affecting everyone from Yemeni Jews who have returned to their ancestral homeland to Christians from Nazareth or Muslims from the Golan Heights.

Israel is well known for its foreign aid missions. In the last 70 years, the country has sent aid missions to Africa, Armenia, Argentina, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Rwanda, Turkey and more. Israel engaged in these missions for a variety of reasons, some pragmatic and others idealistic. But the desire for tikkun olam, repairing the world, and bringing more light into the world played a large role in all of them.

Israelis of all faiths see it as their duty to improve the lives of other people across the globe. Yossi Vardi, one of the godfathers of the country’s high-tech revolution, likes to remind me Jewish culture has bred “a nation of people who do seek higher meaning.”

JP: How has Israeli innovation impacted the world?

AJ: In my book I focus on 15 examples of Israeli innovations that are impacting billions of people, and I also list another 50 in the back of the book to round out the picture. One example is an organization called United Hatzalah which essentially acts as the Uber of emergency responders. The organization’s emergency responders all use a crowdsourcing smartphone app that dispatches the five nearest responders to the scene of an emergency in less than three minutes on average, using ambucycles. Developed by Eli Beer, the founder of a nonprofit called United Hatzalah (United Rescue), this technology can be found today in over 20 countries. Another innovation is drip irrigation, which is used by over a billion people around the world, using a third less water than traditional irrigation techniques and doubles yield. Yet another is Rebif, a drug used by 600,000 of the approximately 2.5 million people afflicted by multiple sclerosis (Copaxone, another popular MS drug, was also developed in Israel). In addition, the firewall was created in Israel by Checkpoint, whose solution protects more than 100,000 businesses, including 94 percent of Fortune 100 firms, 87 percent of Fortune 500 firms, and nearly every government in the world.

The Grain Cocoon, a hermetic storage bag, is playing an important role in curbing global hunger, saving people from malnutrition, and pulling farmers around the globe out of the cycle of poverty. There are 805 million chronically undernourished people in the world. In the developing world, many farmers still use burlap sacks to store their goods. Insects can easily infiltrate these bags, often destroying more than half of a farmer’s harvest. When farmers use pesticides, it often leads to extreme sickness and even death. And worse, over time, toxic products become ineffective.

Professor Shlomo Navarro of the prestigious Israel Agricultural Research Organization is the innovator behind this “Ziploc bag” for rice, grain, spices and legumes. The bag can hold anywhere from five to 300 tons of grain. It’s made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a strong material that doesn’t tear easily. When farmers seal the bag, it traps bugs and their eggs inside and deprives them of oxygen, suffocating them to death, which makes pesticides unnecessary. On average, Navarro says, the cocoon can save more than 99 percent of a farmer’s crops. It can be used any time after harvest collection, and once grain is placed inside it, the insects generally die within about 10 days.

JP: What are your predictions about Israel’s future in the global community?

AJ: Entire industries and countries are looking to Israel to help them solve their challenges: Israel has over 300 research and development centers owned by multinational companies in various fields, including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Intel and Microsoft. China, India and the United States now look to Israel to help solve their increasing water needs. Universities around the world are forging strong partnerships and creating joint innovation centers with Israel’s best and brightest institutions so as to work together in fields including engineering, biology, physics and chemistry. Also, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and agricultural ventures are reaching out to Israel to help them cure the sick and feed the needy. The country is a beacon of hope, and its citizens are ready to help solve local and global challenges.

I expect Israel’s global impact for good to continue into the future. The innovators featured in my book, along with others, will continue to forge ahead and do their part to make the country — and the world — a better place.

The Trump administration is holding firm in negotiations with lawmakers by refusing to swap temporary border wall funding for a temporary extension of a controversial Obama-era program that shields young illegal aliens from deportation, according to reports.

The president has been accused of sending mixed messages in recent months about immigration and border security, so this apparently principled stance ought to please the president’s conservative electoral base which has been questioning his commitment to fixing the nation’s immigration-related problems. The administration is insisting on wall funding, limiting or ending chain migration, and abolishing the diversity green card lottery.

The deal the Washington Post reported this week was under consideration would provide three years of wall funding and a three-year extension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that President Obama created unconstitutionally with the stroke of a pen.

DACA, which six months ago President Trump ordered be terminated by March 5, is on court-ordered life support because in January a leftist federal judge in San Francisco named William Alsup, who seems to have exceptionally poor reading comprehension, convinced himself the U.S. Constitution grants him the authority to second-guess presidential decisions related to aliens and immigration. Alsup acted even though no sane constitutional law scholar believes a president is not allowed to revoke an executive action taken by a previous president. So the Trump administration continues to process DACA paperwork because a Clinton appointee arrogated lawmaking power to himself.

White House spokesman Raj Shah said President Trump doesn’t want to see legal status for applicants under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program dealt with in an omnibus spending bill, Sarah Westwood of the Washington Examiner reports. The federal government will run out of money March 23 and partially shut down if a spending deal cannot be reached.

“The White House opposes a so-called three for three deal,” Shah said.

The president’s people are also reportedly pushing lawmakers to block so-called sanctuary cities that shield illegal aliens from taking in federal funding.

Trump addressed the issue on Twitter on March 13, writing:

California’s sanctuary policies are illegal and unconstitutional and put the safety and security of our entire nation at risk. Thousands of dangerous & violent criminal aliens are released as a result of sanctuary policies, set free to prey on innocent Americans. THIS MUST STOP!

Defunding sanctuary jurisdictions is more popular among Republicans in the House than in the Senate.

“We like that policy,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

As the [spending bill] currently stands, no funding for the wall but there is funding for Planned Parenthood in it, and there is talk of putting insurance bailouts in it. And you think we are going to vote for that?

Conservative lawmakers are understandably loathe to cave on DACA protections for the 700,000 or so affected illegal aliens said to have been brought to the country as youngsters because doing so would obliterate their bargaining power in deliberations about broader immigration policy reforms. A source within the House Freedom Caucus told Westwood the bloc “would not go for” any compromise that produced border wall appropriations alone.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) doesn’t want Congress to keep kicking the immigration can down the road.

“The three for three DACA deal being floated fails to provide long-term certainty for our national security or immigrant families,” Lankford (R-Okla.) said in a press release.

“We need to pursue a permanent solution now. We should discuss the President’s framework proposal and what needs to be done to make it passable.”

Of course, DACA has always been an ignominious example of Caesarism, as well as a brazen Democrat power grab and usurpation of Congress’ constitutionally prescribed role in making laws. Before President Obama created DACA in 2012 unilaterally by decree, he acknowledged such a program would be unconstitutional. “I am not king,” Obama said in 2010, adding the next year that with "respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case."

The political horse-trading continues in Washington as support for abolishing the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) agency appears to be growing among left-wing activists, commentators, and Democrat candidates for public office. It has yet to catch on with actual Democrat office-holders – but give it time.

This leftist temper tantrum isn’t just a rejection of ICE – it is a wholesale repudiation of borders and immigration laws, that is, of the idea of the United States as a sovereign nation. By watching the lawlessness that is increasingly coming to define California, Americans are seeing for themselves what horror and chaos await them should the Left seize the reins of government.

This seditious idea of abolishing ICE appears to be the brainchild of Democrat spin doctor Brian Fallon, who was a spokesman for the nearly-impeached attorney general, Eric Holder. “ICE operates as an unaccountable deportation force,” Fallon tweeted Jan. 21. “Dems running in 2020 should campaign on ending the agency in its current form.”

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a former attorney general of the newly designated sanctuary state of California, was attacked from the left recently for her reluctance to abolish ICE.

“ICE has a purpose, ICE has a role, ICE should exist,” the aspiring presidential candidate said on MSNBC. “But let’s not abuse the power.”

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, California lawmakers made history by appointing activist Lizbeth Mateo, a twice-rejected DACA applicant, to a state board, making her the first illegal alien to hold a statewide government post in California’s history.

This Mexican national, who somehow managed to become a practicing attorney despite being a lawbreaker, will help dole out money to other illegal aliens by serving on the California Student Opportunity and Access Program Project Grant Advisory Committee (Cal-SOAP), which advises the California Student Aid Commission.

Mateo “embodies California values and the American dream,” California Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon (D) gushed. “Ms. Mateo is a courageous, determined and intelligent young woman who at great personal risk has dedicated herself to fight for those seeking their rightful place in this country,” de Leon said.

The state senator is right about one thing: Lizbeth Mateo definitely embodies California values.

Matthew Continetti, a very thoughtful man, is trying to make sense of the current political moment. He spent some time at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, talked to some smart people, and came up with this:

Since 1992, however, the combinations have been all over the place. We have had united Democratic control and united Republican control, Republican presidents with Democratic Congresses and Democratic presidents with Republican Congresses, and both Republican and Democratic presidents with Congresses split between the parties. “The reestablishment of unified Democratic control under Bill Clinton,” writes Fiorina in his great new book, “began a two-decade-long (and counting) period of electoral outcomes that defy generalizations like those describing the three previous eras.”

Read the article. It’s unusually insightful. But when I see “1992,” I don’t think only about American elections. I think about the end of the Soviet Union, and with it a half-century of unusual history. I think that is the proper context for understanding what’s going on, both in America and throughout the world.

Most people think war is unusual and peace is the norm, but anyone who studies human history knows it’s the other way around. Mostly there’s war and the preparation for war, while peace, which is rare, only happens when someone wins a war and imposes conditions on the loser. Those conditions are usually codified in a “peace treaty,” and the parties resume preparation for the next war.

Then came the post-war period, the one that began with the decimation of Nazism and fascism. We took over Germany and Japan and effectively prevented them from rearming. For half a century, we and the Soviet Union imposed peace on most of the rest of the world. Funnily, this extended period of peace is called a war, albeit a “cold war,” but peace it was, and the Russians told half the world what to do, while it was up to us to manage the other half. This long period convinced a lot of people that peace was normal, an opinion that did not immediately change when the Soviet Empire imploded late last century.

Some serious thinkers, such as Francis Fukuyama, pronounced that, henceforth, American-style liberal democracy would dominate global politics, and even President Bill Clinton bought in. Turned out to be a false prophecy. The world reverted to normal, and there is now a global war. A fighting war, not a “cold” war. Except no one can see it. Yes, there are stories of fighting in Syria and Yemen. Pictures, even videos. But most people fail to see that these battlefields are part of a global war, in which we are very much involved.

As the target.

This stage of the war reminds me of trying to sort out all the players in the Balkans during the First World War. Countries, tribes and various ethnic and religious groups fought one another, and the big powers weighed in. It was virtually impossible to figure out where the boundaries lay, who was morally or historically entitled to sovereignty (Macedonia, for example) and independence. Alliances were formed and dissolved at a dizzying rate. So when I look at a map of Syria, Iraq and Iran, I think Balkans, 1916. Inevitably, the Germans, French and Brits, and sometimes the Italians, joined various campaigns. When the war ended, boundaries were settled, for a time, by the Peace Conference at Versailles. I’m pretty sure the national boundaries in the Middle East will be similarly defined by the winners of this war.

This war, like World War I, has global dimensions, but we understandably focus on one battlefield at a time. Yet it’s luminously clear that there is an anti-American alliance among the world’s leading tyrannies—at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba. They aim to destroy us, as they say with tedious monotony, but hardly anyone here seems to notice. I ask the pundits “what do you think ‘death to America’ means?” They give me a funny look, as if that was the first time they’d thought about it. And the notion that we face a global enemy alliance seems fanciful to them.

Yet, look at Syria, where Assad is currently winning. Why? Because of Iranian fighters and their proxies. Until recently, that wasn’t good enough to save the Syrian dictator. Now it is, because the Iranians begged Putin to help them. Which he did. So the currently dominant force in Syria is composed of Iran and her jihadist proxies plus Russia, with some Chinese and North Korean help thrown in from time to time.

As they fight on in Syria, they are preparing to tackle us in the near future. There is extensive evidence of enemy infiltration of the United States, and our hemispheric neighbors. Just ask the commander of SOCOM:

Extremist networks like ISIS reach deep into our hemisphere, inspire would-be terrorists to conduct attacks in the region, or to attempt entry into the United States to do our citizens harm."

Pressed to elaborate on ISIS movement in the Western Hemisphere, (Admiral) Tidd pointed to the at least 100 jihadists, by that government's count, from Trinidad and Tobago who fought for ISIS abroad.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

“2018 will be the year of women,” CNN declared last year.

What was the greatest achievement of women in ’17 and ’18? Ask the media and they’ll tell you that it’s Hillary Clinton running on her husband’s name and losing an election before blaming it on sexism. Or the #MeToo movement’s transformation from fighting abuse to #TimesUp calls for Hollywood quotas. Or the Women’s March, whose leader was caught cheering on a Farrakhan speech in which the racist leader told black women that their husbands were fat because they were too lazy to cook.

“You lazy woman," the man whom a leftist activist behind the Women’s March praised as the greatest, ranted. "Who the hell wants a woman with a good shape and a fat behind that don’t know how to prepare no food for her husband and her children?"

There’s the media’s official feminism.

Hillary Clinton blaming her defeat on white women listening to their husbands, Harvey Weinstein’s pals exploiting the crimes that they kept quiet about for special #TimesUp privileges and a Women’s March in thrall to a man who had declared, “Allah says in the Qur’an that men are a degree above women.”

While the media was chasing fake feminism, President Trump nominated Gina Haspel as the first female head of the CIA. And instead of celebrating this amazing milestone, the media wasted no time before smearing an accomplished woman who had succeeded in one of the country’s most dangerous fields.

The media fed the myth that Valerie Plame, an anti-Semitic socialite who was key to a leftist campaign against the Bush administration, was a covert operative who faced danger every day. Unlike Plame, last seen pushing the Iran Deal and ranting about the Jews, Haspel is the real thing. She joined the CIA in ’85 and received the Intelligence Medal of Merit.

Gina Haspel was on the ground around the world, including in the Thai jungle where captured Al Qaeda terrorists were interrogated. And Haspel proved to be much tougher than some of the male politicians back in Washington D.C. who wanted to fight the terrorists who had murdered thousands of people in this country, but expected them to give up their secrets without any inconvenience or pressure.

Haspel and the people under her did the difficult and unrewarding job they had to do for their country. And, like the Vietnam veterans of a previous generation, they returned from Asia to jeers and smears. The women and men who had gone into the heart of darkness had their names dragged through the mud and their careers destroyed by the Democrats and their radical leftist media allies.

Senator Dick Durbin compared them to the “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags” and “Pol Pot”. CNN's Anderson Cooper echoed him, "if you envision Nazis doing this, and I even hate to say this, if you envision the Khmer Rouge doing this." And Senator McCain, who is already attacking Haspel, sleazily compared it to Pol Pot, the Spanish Inquisition and the Japanese torture of Americans during WW2.

Now many of the same activists who originally took credit for stopping Haspel in ’13 are back at it again. And some turncoat Republicans like McCain have joined them. Senator McCain has accused Gina Haspel of being involved in “one of the darkest chapters in American history”.

One of the darkest chapters of American history came when we stopped fighting Islamic terrorists and instead turned on those who did. We have nothing to atone for when it comes to our treatment of terrorists. We have something to atone for when it comes to how we treated the men and women who put their lives and careers on the line from Afghanistan to Benghazi to fight Durbin and McCain’s pals.

The same media that feigned outrage at the myth of Valerie Plame were eager to leak the names and destroy the reputations of those intelligence personnel who had been in the trenches of terror. And the media never tired of its weepy depictions of suffering Islamic terrorists being tortured by Americans.

Despite Obama Inc’s obsession with diversity, Gina Haspel was not allowed to serve as National Clandestine Service director because of her work fighting terrorists. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA boss, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, blocked her in ’13. And so a talented woman was demoted instead.

"CIA director John Brennan apparently has decided to postpone and reverse the appointment of the first woman to head the CIA directorate of operations (which controls all covert operations and spying)," John Yoo wrote. "This is a lot more serious than the hypocrisy of the diversity-crazed Obama administration’s blocking the first woman for this most sensitive and important of intelligence positions. This is the very politicization of the CIA that conservatives feared when Brennan was nominated."

To maintain diversity, Brennan’s CIA elevated two other women instead. Diversity says that all women are interchangeable elements in a gender quota. It doesn’t matter which woman you pick, as long as it’s a woman. Romney was mocked for his “binders full of women” remark, but it was Obama who actually treated women as an interchangeable bunch of names, rather than as individuals with talent and ability.

While Obama may have kept her down, Trump recognized her merit. Real feminism is not made with #TimesUp style gender quotas, but it is the right to have your individual achievements recognized.

Gina Haspel’s belated recognition is an important moment for her and for the people in our intelligence community, a group that the media has recently begun celebrating in the abstract while smearing them as individuals, who put their reputations on the line after 9/11. And it’s also a historical milestone.

Last year we were told that Hillary Clinton, a political hack who owed her entire career to her husband, represented a political milestone. But Gina Haspel is here because she put in the decades of work. She’s one of the many hardworking women who were given an opportunity to rise by this administration. And their authentically historical milestones are being overlooked by a media obsessed with hating them.

"The 'First Woman CIA Director' Is a Smokescreen," an Atlantic smear insists. "Gina Haspel's gender is the least important fact about her." Like so many other examples of the pro-terrorist genre, it treats us to piteous images of the poor terrorists and the cruel CIA people who made them feel very bad.

And yet there is something very powerful in the image of a woman standing up to Islamic terrorists.

Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood and the various strains of the Islamic movement envision a world in which women are segregated and enslaved. The female interrogators who turned the tables on captured Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were making a meaningful feminist statement. They were doing what the abused women in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan would never be able to do.

They fought back.

The media’s idea of a feminist heroine is Linda Sarsour. And Sarsour’s idea of feminism was protecting a sexual harasser, praising Saudi Arabia and Farrakhan. That’s also Tamika Mallory’s idea of feminism. Gina Haspel’s idea of feminism was going after the Islamic terrorists looking to realize Sarsour and Farrakhan’s idea of a perfect Islamic society where women and non-Muslims know their place.

Gina Haspel’s nomination sends a message to Islamic terrorists and their domestic collaborators. And it shows that real feminism looks nothing like the Women’s March. It looks like the new head of the CIA.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The buzz about President Trump’s possible meeting with North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un has been followed by the usual Trumpophobe disdain matched by Trumpophile enthusiasm. But if this recent talk of an unprecedented presidential face-to-face negotiation with Kim turns into a reality, don’t expect much other than photo-ops and diplomatic clichés like “progress” and “productive,” with nothing meaningful accomplished. The Kim dynasty has been playing this game for three generations, and have become masters of exploiting the West’s diplomatic magical thinking that talk alone can stop a determined aggressor.

We know that Trump considers himself a master negotiator, eager to solve intractable foreign policy conflicts. Getting the Norks to denuclearize would be “the greatest deal in the world,” as the president said, something he reminds us his three predecessors could not accomplish. Perhaps the time is ripe. Kim may be feeling pressure from economic sanctions, especially since China has supported U.N. sanctions on their regional pit-bull. Or maybe Kim takes seriously Trump’s “fire and fury” threats, considering that the unconventional Trump may be a Nixonian “crazy” man who just might act on his bluster.

But as a perusal of the history compiled by the Arms Control Association shows, the canny Kims have survived over three decades of sanctions and saber-rattling rhetoric, participated in numerous negotiations and summits, and signed a plethora of agreements they have serially violated. Their aim has been clear throughout: possession of nuclear weapons that can be delivered on missiles capable of reaching the U.S. The vague “concessions” and “concrete actions” expected of the North before talks can begin, not to mention the suggested goal of the talks that North Korea gives up its nuclear weapons, are highly unlikely to be forthcoming.

And from Kim’s perspective, why should he? His big brother, China, may nudge him a bit, but the Chinese are unlikely to abandon a powerful geopolitical weapon that discomfits their great-power rival. The collapse of the Kim regime would create chaos on China’s border, and a unified democratic Korea would be a blow to China’s program of displacing the U.S. in the South China Sea and the whole western Pacific. More important, Kim (and Pakistan and nuclear aspirant Iran) learned the lesson of Muamar Gaddafi’s surrender of his nuclear program. Thanks to the Obama-Clinton massive blunder of removing Gaddafi from power, the Libyan strong-man ended up dead after suffering an iron-rod enema.

Then why is Kim now entertaining talks with the U.S.? He can relieve some of the pressure from China, who is no doubt annoyed by his bellicose braggadocio, which complicates China’s regional designs. He can bask in the international prestige that comes from sitting as an equal across from the president of the world’s greatest power, especially if the talks take place in D.C., with all the photogenic pomp and circumstance of a state visit. As the North has done before, Kim may wring a concession from the U.S., such as offering an unverifiable halt to his missile development in exchange for sanctions relief. Or he could have the Americans turn down his demands, like withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea or normalization of relations, after which he could claim that he came to the table in good faith, but was blocked by U.S. intransigence and arrogance.

In other words, even if the talks materialize, the outcome for Kim is likely to be a win for him, and a humiliating blow to Trump’s reputed prowess at deal-making. Meanwhile, as the North has done for over two decades––getting “carrots” while the U.S. is smacked with “sticks”–– the whole spectacle will buy Kim time to progress ever closer to his goal of being able to threaten the U.S. with nuclear-tipped missiles.

From a broader historical perspective, this latest act in the North Korea farce reveals the fundamental weakness of the West’s foreign policy ideals. For over a century the West has believed that a universal human nature craves all the goods that the advanced West has achieved: peaceful coexistence with neighbors, leisure and prosperity, human rights, political freedom, secular tolerance, and the resolution of conflicts by diplomatic engagement and negotiation. Thus non-lethal signed agreements or economic sanctions, enforced by transnational institutions like the U.N. or the International Atomic Energy Agency, can resolve interstate conflicts without resorting to the “exorbitant risks,” as Kissinger put it, and politically toxic use of armed force.

But this ideal assumes that all the diverse countries of the world, with their different cultures, mores, and interests, value peaceful coexistence or “win-win” cooperation as much as we Westerners do. Some do, but more do not. That thinking is the age-old mistake of interstate relations––the failure of imagination that keeps us from understanding mentalities and motives different from ours. We don’t want to admit that there are regimes, and even cultures, that prefer violently satisfying their own interests or irrational passions to our notions of peace and prosperity through mutually beneficial cooperation.

These delusions are especially dangerous when the conflict is with a ruthless, maybe psychopathic aggressor, particularly one who knows us and our cultural ideals better than we know his. Aware of our fetish for words and process over risky force and action, he can manipulate diplomatic engagement to buy time and extract concessions until he can achieve his aim. Unless his mind is concentrated otherwise by force, he will not be deterred by the overwhelming military advantage of his enemy, since he judges from his foe’s behavior that he has no will to act.

He also knows that political leaders in a constitutional government, unlike an autocrat––who can command his country’s forces and aims without check or accountability––are constrained by law and ballot-box accountability, and are often unwilling to pay the political price for military action. So those leaders will resort to diplomatic “engagement” as a way to stall––Obama’s euphemism was “strategic patience” –– until it is some other elected official’s problem.

This set of beliefs, serially repudiated by the blood-stained history of the last two centuries, has maintained a fierce grasp on the minds of our foreign policy establishment. And it has been for the most part bipartisan received wisdom. Some may want to blame Obama or Bill Clinton for the mess in North Korea, but Bush junior and senior made their contributions. Even more depressing, we have in the historical record, especially in the decades leading up to World War II, monitory examples of this dynamic. But astonishingly, it didn’t keep Barack Obama from repeating that sorry history in his agreement with Iran, which has followed the North Korea playbook faithfully, and is on track to duplicate the Nork’s success.

The point is not that engagement with an enemy or rival can’t work, or that only war is the answer. But diplomacy has to be backed-up by a credible threat of force. Without that credibility, the foundation of international prestige, an enemy will dismiss our stern warnings and damage our global prestige. The Dems who castigated Trump’s “fire and fury” rhetoric forget the empty bluster of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. In 2014 Obama blustered that the U.S. “will not hesitate to use our military might” when it came to defending South Korea. More than twenty years earlier Bill Clinton issued an even sterner threat, telling the North that if they attacked “we would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate,” that such an attack “would mean the end of their country as they know it,” and that “they would pay a price so great that the nation would probably not survive as it is known today.” Of course, those words were mere sound and fury, met with contempt by the Norks, who continued down the road to nuclear weapons.

Given that the North Korean regime has serially been there and done that, it’s unlikely that Trump will do any better, leaving his tough talk as empty as his predecessors’. But let’s not slip into the easy evasion of blaming our leaders for this fecklessness. In a democracy the people hold politicians accountable with their votes in elections that take place every two years. Since ancient Athens, a democracy is often unwilling to consider distant calamities as important as the current comforts that would have to be sacrificed to forestall later disasters. Unless China intervenes more forcefully, the problem of a nuclear North Korea––and soon a nuclear Iran––will have to be dealt with by means of severe military action, a choice that voters are unlikely to make.

We’ll soon see if Trump’s gambit reprises the sorry history of “engagement,” or is a move in some deeper strategy, or is just another public relations feint to distract the Trump-obsessed media. But if he is sincere, let’s hope he knows that the North Korea engagement game is rigged, and that negotiating with a ruthless autocrat is light-years from dickering with the toughest CEO.

President Trump chose Larry Kudlow to serve as his top economic adviser, replacing Gary Cohn, the White House said Wednesday. “Larry Kudlow was offered, and accepted, the position of Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Director of the National Economic Council," Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. "We will work to have an orderly transition and will keep everyone posted on the timing of him officially assuming the role.”

"I'm honored to take this position," Mr. Kudlow said on CNBC, where he has appeared frequently as a senior contributor.

The Wall Street Journal, which has had its sharp differences with President Trump on such issues as trade, praised the Kudlow appointment. “The long-time CNBC commentator is an excellent choice to replace Gary Cohn, having helped Mr. Trump craft his campaign tax plan. Mr. Kudlow, a stalwart from the GOP’s growth wing going back to the Reagan Administration, also played a crucial role persuading Congress to support the reform that passed in December.”

Mr. Kudlow, who had served in the Reagan administration as an economic adviser on budget policy, is a self-described Reagan conservative who believes in supply side economics. One of his close friends is Arthur Laffer, called by some “The Father of Supply Side Economics.” Arthur Laffer praised Mr. Kudlow as “a very sensitive man and a very logical man, which is exactly what Trump needs. And if by chance, he doesn’t convince the president of something, he will be a loyal employee. He stays loyal even if the decision goes against him.”

Larry Kudlow has wholeheartedly supported President Trump’s tax cut initiative. “Trump and the GOP are on the side of the growth angels with the passage of powerful tax-cut legislation to boost business investment, wages, and take-home family pay,” Mr. Kudlow wrote in a CNBC op-ed. “The Democrats, meanwhile, are left with stale class-warfare slogans about tax cuts for the rich.”

Larry Kudlow has also been on board with President Trump on other elements of his domestic policies. “He's so good on deregulation, infrastructure. I even like him on immigration,” Mr. Kudlow said March 1st on CNBC. However, during the same appearance, Mr. Kudlow parted ways with the president on his tariffs announcement, which he called “a bad omen." Mr. Kudlow added that, in his opinion, President Trump has “never been good on trade."

Larry Kudlow also wrote, along with Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, a March 3rd op-ed on CNBC’s site, claiming that while steel and aluminum may win in the short term, “steel and aluminum users and consumers will lose. In fact, tariff hikes are really tax hikes.”

Mr. Kudlow’s predecessor Gary Cohn, who was a strong believer in free trade and globalism, could not persuade the president to abandon his plan to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. As a result, Mr. Cohn resigned his position. Not wanting to start out in the Trump administration on the wrong foot, Mr. Kudlow has more recently pulled back a bit from his opposition to President Trump’s tariffs decision. In a radio interview last Sunday, he tried to finesse the issue by chalking up President Trump’s tariffs announcement to the “Trumpian way of negotiating. You knock them in the teeth and get their attention. And then you kind of work out a deal, and I think that's what he's done. My hat's off to him. He had me really worried. Now I'm not."

As proof in his mind that President Trump is not simply pursuing a blanket protectionist policy for the steel and aluminum industries, Mr. Kudlow pointed out that Canada, Mexico, and Australia are already exempt. He predicted that European countries and our allies in Asia will also wind up being exempt. China could find itself the only major country not getting an exemption when all is said and done.

In his first public interview since President Trump offered him the job Tuesday evening, Larry Kudlow focused his attention on China, a country that, he said, “has earned a tough response not only from the United States." He emphasized that he was only against “blanket tariffs” because he didn’t think “you should punish your friends to try and punish your enemies in international affairs."

Mr. Kudlow proposed “a sort of a trade coalition of the willing" to counter China’s economic pressure. "A thought that I have is the United States could lead a coalition of large trading partners and allies against China, or to let China know that they're breaking the rules left and right," he said. "That's the way I'd like to see.”

President Trump likes such out-of-the-box thinking. “We don’t agree on everything, but in this case I think that’s good,” President Trump said on Tuesday before the official White House announcement of Larry Kudlow’s appointment. “I want to have different opinions. We agree on most. He now has come around to believing in tariffs as a negotiating point. I’m renegotiating trade deals and without tariffs we wouldn’t do nearly as well. But Larry has been a friend of mine for a long time. He backed me very early in the campaign; I think the earliest; I think he was one of my original backers. He’s a very, very talented man, a good man.”

Larry Kudlow will have to get through the security clearance process, which may be hampered somewhat by his acknowledged drug and alcohol addiction more than two decades ago. He said that he has been clean and sober for nearly 23 years and is willing to see how this issue plays out as a White House staff nominee.

Assuming he survives the security clearance process, Mr. Kudlow will have to then deal with the contending voices for the president’s ear, most notably that of National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro who is pro-tariff. Nevertheless, Peter Navarro and Larry Kudlow may well find common ground in dealing with the economic challenges that China presents to the United States and its allies. The quality of economic advice that President Trump will be receiving, including on trade issues, will be enhanced by Larry Kudlow’s presence on the president's economic team.

On March 16, 1988, after sustained shelling and aerial bombardments had driven most of the inhabitants of the Kurdish town of Halabja into their basements, Saddam Hussein ordered his air force to change munitions – and missions.

Instead of softening up the Kurdish town for an assault by Iraqi government troops, the air force now planned exterminate the population using chemical weapons.

One survivor, Kherwan, said he remembered smelling “an aroma that reminded me of apples” shortly before losing consciousness. “When I awoke, there were hundreds of bodies scattered around me.”

Mothers were later found lying in the streets, wrapped around their dead infants; some had died cradling their children to keep them from falling.

Today, thirty years later, the surviving victims continue to remember the horrors of that day and those they lost.

Zimnako Mohammad Ahmed was just three months old when his mother tried to carry him to safety in the nearby mountains and fell unconscious in the darkness. Iranian soldiers found him the next morning and took him to Tehran for treatment, and ultimately, adoption.

“My whole family thought I was dead,” he told Radio Free Europe. Those who survived had even erected a tombstone for him in the family grave plot.

Zimnako was lucky. He managed to return to Halabja and convince local authorities to conduct DNA tests to find his family. But hundreds of others have not been so lucky.

While Saddam Hussein and “Chemical Ali” (aka Ali Hasan al-Majid) were tried and executed by the Iraq High Tribunal for their attempted genocide against the Kurds, many of their victims continue to suffer from the effects of chemical weapons and can ill afford expensive lung transplants and other treatments.

This week, a group of survivors filed a historic lawsuit in an Iraqi court, hoping to find some measure of justice – and potentially, compensation – from the companies and individuals who built Saddam’s chemical weapons.

For the most part, the defendants are Germans and German companies. And one of them – tourism giant, TUI, formerly known as Preussag – have deep pockets.

Chicago lawyer Gavi Mairone began working on the case eight years ago, at a time when neither Iraq nor Germany had laws that would permit such a suit.

Today that has changed, and Mairone is hoping that a liability judgment in Iraq will help the victims to collect against the companies in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

“When warned by Western intelligence and the media about how these weapons were being used, rather than ceasing engagement, these companies allegedly chose to find alternatives to continue the conspiracy and ensure the chemical weapons plants could continue to operate,” Mairone told a press conference in Halabja yesterday.

The complaint alleges that TUI and others “knew” that building Saddam’s chemical weapons plants “would require each of them to conceal their activities, falsify documents, mislead and lie to government officials, intentionally violate laws in numerous countries, and fraudulently induce other companies and persons to unwittingly assist” their efforts.

The German government twice tried to prosecute the most notorious of the perpetrators, including Karl Kolb GmbH and Preussag. But German laws in force in the late 1980s were insufficient for a conviction.

It became the most notorious and best-documented case in history of Western companies enabling a dictator to commit genocide. And yet, the guilty suffered no consequences, and the victims continued to suffer.

I documented the German “poison gas connection” for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1990, and two years later in my book, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq, which included a map and detailed descriptions of scores of Iraqi WMD facilities, some of them unknown at the time.

Later, I worked with attorneys who sued some of the American companies of the poison gas connection on behalf of U.S. veterans poisoned by what became known as Gulf War Syndrome.

This body of work – which included extensive, proprietary data bases I maintained on suppliers of WMD technology – came to Mairone’s attention when he decided in 2013 to push his legal action on behalf of the Halabja victims into higher gear.

I had the opportunity five years ago on this day to attend ceremonies in Halabja to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal attack against Iraqi Kurds along with Mairone and his legal team.

We sat for hours listening to the stories of survivors. We collected documents from the earlier trials against Saddam Hussein and Chemical Ali. We made contacts and laid the groundwork for a future lawsuit.

I was engaged to sift through documents and reports from German Customs, the United Nations Special Commission for the Disarmament of Iraq, and many other sources, to identify the biggest culprits whose guilt I felt Mairone and his team had a good chance of establishing in a fair court.

Now, five years later, that time has come. You can read the complaint here.

Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, founder of Genocide Watch, has identified ten stages of genocide, from the identification and stigmatizing of the future victims, to post murder denial and cover-up.

“Genocide is not an unpredictable phenomenon like a hurricane,” he told a conference to commemorate the Halabja genocide earlier this week. “By understanding the logic of genocide, people can recognize the early warnings signs,” he says.

Saddam’s genocide against the Kurds was many years in the making, just as were the genocides in Rwanda, and the Assyrian Christians in northern Iraq.

Dr. Stanton believes the signs of the next genocide – once again, against the Kurds – are already visible.

“In 1989, I predicted the genocide in Rwanda, five years before it happened,” he said this week. “In 2008, Genocide Watch predicted another genocide on its way in northern Iraq. The next genocide will come from Turkey, Iran, and Syrian and Iraqi government forces, and it will be directed against the Kurds.”

He believes these powers have gone way beyond the initial stages of discrimination and dehumanization, and are actively preparing for military operations to eradicate the Kurds, of which Afrin is perhaps the first step.

“The Ottoman, Persian, and Arab empires must never rise again,” he warned.

Genocide takes time. It requires planning, a great deal of preparation, and methodical execution.

But justice takes even longer. The Halabja victims have waited for thirty years already, and they haven’t yet had their day in court, while their victimizers remain free.

When it comes to cyber security, much attention has been focused on Russia due to that nation’s recent cyber efforts to interfere with the 2016 general election. This includes the creation of bots to spread fake news as well as attempts to penetrate voter registration rolls. China too is active in this new realm of virtual warfare engaging in systematic efforts to steal Western technology. China’s J-20 and J-31 fifth generation jet fighters are said to be based on stealth technology stolen from the United States. China also hacked into U.S. Steel's computers and stole trade secrets for advanced, high-strength steel and then incorporated that technology in its own manufacturing processes. Other bad actors include North Korea which, in 2014, infamously hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment and also engaged in attempts to digitally loot banking institutions including an unsuccessful effort to loot the Federal Reserve to the tune of $1 billion.

But when it comes to mischief-making, it’s a sure bet that the Islamic Republic is lurking and cyber terrorism is no exception. While Iran’s cyber hacking operatives have not reached the level of sophistication and capability of their Russian and Chinese partners in crime, they are very active in this new area of virtual warfare and are learning quickly.

Iran first connected to the internet in 1992, and by 2000, most Iranians were connected to the information superhighway in some form. Iranian cyber terrorists operating at the behest of the regime initially focused their activities internally; spying on dissidents and those deemed to be headaches for the regime but soon exported their mischief globally.

In 2009, Iranian hackers, calling themselves “Iranian Cyber Army” forced Twitter to shut down for several hours after the hackers defaced the site. Twitter had been used by Green Revolution activists to spread the word about Iran’s rigged 2009 elections.

In the summer of 2011, Iranian hackers struck again, this time targeting the prestigious Dutch certificate authority security company DigiNotar. The hack, which sent shudders through the world of cyber security, enabled Iranian cyber operatives to compromise the Gmail accounts of some 300,000 Iranian citizens. Iranian internal spy agencies were then able access the contents of those accounts. The embarrassing but audacious security breach forced DigiNotar into bankruptcy and dissolution.

Iranian hackers graduated from defacing Twitter and compromising Gmail accounts to destroying critical infrastructure. On the morning of August 15, 2012 at precisely 11:08, an Iranian virus known as Shamoon infected the corporate PCs of one of the world’s largest oil companies, the Saudi firm Aramco. August 15 was a religious holiday in Saudi Arabia so most employees stayed home. When they returned to work the following morning and switched on their PCs, they discovered that their data vanished, replaced by a burning American flag. The attack, which destroyed data on some 35,000 computers, was regarded by cyber security experts as among one of the most destructive of its kind.

The following month, Iranian hackers struck again launching a series of denial-of-service attacks directed at U.S. banks. DoS attacks flood a website with volumes of traffic until the site crashes. Customers of Bank of America, Citigroup, HSBC, Wells Fargo, and Capital One among others were not able to access their accounts online.

Iranian cyber-attacks tapered off in 2015 following the signing of the catastrophic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action but have since resumed. In November 2016 and January 2017, Saudi agencies and companies became targets of Shamoon 2, a variant of the virus that wreaked havoc on Aramco’s computers in 2012.

Iran has become adept in using proxies to carry out its dirty work in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and other regions throughout the Mideast. By doing so, Iran limits its own casualties and can also deny direct involvement by claiming that these proxies are indigenous movements fighting against U.S.-backed imperialism. This strategy extends to hostile Iranian cyber activities. Hackers directed by the Islamic Republic have become proficient at hiding their tracks. Often, they will leave red herring clues designed to deflect suspicion away from the Iranian government.

In addition to its rogue nuclear activities (which have not ceased despite the signing of the JCPOA), its advanced ICBM program, its use of proxies to spread misery throughout the Mideast, its narco-terror and money laundering schemes, the West now has to contend with growing Iranian cyber security menace.

While the Iranians are lightyears behind their American and Israeli counterparts in the fields of cyber warfare and cyber security, the menace posed by the Islamic Republic in this relatively new area of warfare cannot be overstated. The only way to stop this Iranian sponsored aggression is by remaining vigilant and by informing the mullahs in no uncertain terms that attacks of this nature will be met by responses that are manifestly more destructive in size and scope. Iran may be expert at killing women and children and suppressing internal dissent with ruthless efficiency but this is one theater of warfare where Iran is at a distinct disadvantage and will remain so for decades to come.

In a recent interview on Truth Matters, hosted by Tony Gurule, Shillman Fellow Raymond Ibrahim, author most recently of Sword and Scimitar, discussed the topic of “Jihad: Past and Present.” The 30-minute video follows:

One day, when I was nine years old, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we neared the entrance, I spat on the ground. Reflexively, my dad’s arm shot out across my chest like a railway barrier, blocking my motion forward. We stood there, frozen in time, for some three seconds until my father uttered, in a very serious but patient way: “It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this.” I registered the message and indicated my understanding — and we proceeded on our way.

That was my dad’s moral clarity and sharp, quick-witted way with words; and the sacred values that spawned those words made a profound impression on me from the moment of my birth. I was born into a family of Russian dissidents who put their clenched fists up and went toe-to-toe with the Evil Empire.

Throughout my youth, my dad shared many stories with me, which included how he had always been aware, even in his youth, that he existed in a slave camp masquerading as a country and that he perpetually dreamed of escaping it. He spent his young years studying maps, trying to decipher which body of water he could swim across to escape the communist paradise he languished in. But his life ended up going a different way: he confronted the slave masters, rather than escaping the prison they had built.

My father was a scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a professor at Moscow State University. His main field of study concerned Oriental languages and cultures, with a specialty in the Chinese, Sanskrit and Tamil areas. Despite his rewarding career, my dad put everything on the line and began to attend human rights demonstrations in Moscow on behalf of political prisoners. He also started to sign letters of protest against the political repressions that were heightening in the country in the 1960s, connected as they were to the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union after the Khrushchev thaw. The activities my dad engaged in could land a Soviet citizen in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital for decades.

On February 24, 1968, my father signed the Letter of Twelve, a letter written and signed by twelve Soviet dissidents to the Supreme Congress of Communist Parties in Budapest denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. He was immediately fired from his work for being “unprofessional” in his scholarly studies (even though he previously had received high praise for his academic studies).

The picture of my dad, shown above, was taken by a friend who had come to visit him the evening of the day he was expelled from the Academy. My father had been at a meeting at the closed section of the Supreme Soviet of Scholars. Before the committee announced his expulsion, he had delivered a strong speech about political repressions in the country and finished by talking about his hope that the days of freedom would one day come to his beloved Russia.

After his expulsion, my father received a labor card with a special secret code that meant that he was blacklisted and could not receive employment anywhere in the country. He even tried to get a job cleaning streets, but was refused once an employer saw the poisoned markings. In a Soviet Catch-22, because of his “unemployment,” the KGB began to persecute my father for “parasitism” — a law in the Soviet Union that criminalized unemployed people and subsequently shipped them off to labor camps in Siberia.

Under these circumstances, my dad’s health broke down. He became very sick, came down with sepsis (blood poisoning) and was hospitalized. The Communist Party was as cold and unforgiving as the Siberian winter, and the KGB sharks waited for him to either die or to arrive home from his sickbed, upon which they would continue their persecution of him. Because of very brave friends like Dr. Anna Marshak who provided Western medication to my father, he survived. His sickness and several other developments threw the unfolding narrative down a different path.

During this time, a friend of our family’s told my dad that, under vicious harassment by the KGB (they had discovered an affair she was having and threatened to tell her husband), she had agreed to be a witness for them in a trial against my father that would charge (and convict) him of selling foreign currency and drugs on the black market (which she would place in our apartment). Upon hearing this, my dad knew the KGB was going for the jugular and that he only had one hand left to play. He immediately sent a letter to the Department for Exit Visas in which he said: give me a job or let me out of the country. Shortly afterwards, in April 1972, before Nixon’s visit to Moscow — and perhaps because of that visit — my father received the Exit Visa to emigrate from the Soviet Union. In escaping the Soviet hell, he was able to bring his family to the West.

[My family, after my father was expelled from the Academy. I’m the youngest, with my older brother and sister behind me. My mom is above my brother to dad’s right.]

My father never stopped fighting the Soviet system and the murderous, anti-human ideology that spawned it. He never fell into silence about the genocide and monstrous oppression communism engendered everywhere it set foot. He was always outspoken on behalf of political prisoners that languished in communist gulags around the world. I grew up in this spirit that my dad (and mom) nurtured in our family, and my heart and mind, from a young age, were preoccupied with the fate and sufferings of political dissidents fighting and suffering under totalitarian regimes.

I am eternally grateful to my father, and to my mother, for having instilled in me one of the highest values in life, which we find in Hebrews 13:3: Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

And that is precisely that value that explains why I am at Frontpage Magazine today, fighting on the front lines alongside a noble warrior like David Horowitz on behalf of freedom fighters everywhere, and in particular the brave Christians, Jews, Muslim dissidents and all other minorities and peoples who are being viciously persecuted under Islamist tyranny.

When my dad arrived in the U.S. via Italy, he first taught at New York University and then at Boston College as Professor of Russian Studies. He then moved to Canada in 1975 to teach at the Department of Russian Studies at Dalhousie University. He loved to teach Fyodor Dostoevsky and the history of Russian ideas.

[My mom and dad in Italy in 1972 when we first left the Soviet Union.]

In 1992, the Soviet Academy of Sciences apologized to my father for persecuting him earlier, and now invited him to re-establish scholarly contacts. In the mid-1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, my father received a document from the Sakharov Archives located in Boston. Dated February 19, 1971, it was a top secret letter written by Yuri Andropov, leader of the KGB at the time, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Filled with obscene lies and clear self-induced lies, it accused my dad of terrorism and espionage, indicating the kind of trial the KGB was preparing for my dad in those horrifying years. This document proves how much the KGB hated dissidents and spread the most vicious lies about them (being CIA agents etc.).

Bugging the regular conversations of my father with Sakharov, mostly in Sakharov’s apartment, the KGB deliberately distorted the discussions, parts of which dealt with the history of terrorism in Russia. The so-called “espionage” of my father was based on his correspondence with international scholars in his field, which my father dared to conduct in those dangerous years. Naturally, his letters were perlustrated and listed in the KGB files.

My dad died of cancer, twenty years ago, on March 15, 1998. It was before the Vladimir Putin period, but my father already gauged, with great disappointment, what was happening in his beloved homeland. He understood the disaster and tragedy concerning the future moral health of his country when Nuremberg-style trials did not follow the collapse of the Soviet Union. The crimes and atrocities of Soviet communism – and the ideology that engendered the mass murder of 60 million people – were all supposed to be revealed and condemned. The secret KGB archives were supposed to be opened. The exposure and judgment of high ranking KGB officers and communist officials were supposed to take place in front of the whole world. Instead, these criminals and mafia figures remained in power — just in new clothing and using new language.

New school textbooks were supposed to be introduced – like those in post-war Germany that dealt honestly with the crimes of the Nazi era. It is impossible to imagine Hitler being praised in today’s German school texts or his glorified portrait being hung high in the streets of Germany. But in Russia, the mirror image of that horror happened and still continues today.

So, today, with Putin and his KGB thugs and murderers still in power, we witnessed, a few years back, the preparation for the 65th anniversary celebration of the Soviet victory in WWII marked with portraits of Joseph Stalin as the country’s victorious war-time leader. This is no surprise, of course, since Putin has overseen a strong pining for Stalin in Russia, which manifested itself in a beverage plant in Volgograd releasing a series of soft drinks picturing the dictator on its labels and in the introduction of new textbooks in schools speaking of the mass murderer as, among other things, an “effective manager.”

What would my father have thought of all of these developments if he were alive today? So many dissidents sacrificed their lives fighting for freedom in the Soviet Union. For what? Russia was given the window of opportunity to choose freedom in the early 1990s, but it chose to turn its back on this historic opportunity. My father shared the same fate as many of his friends and other dissidents: if you avoided being murdered, you passed away early from cancer or other illnesses. One can only imagine what terrible stress these freedom fighters endured for the sake of bringing liberty to their nation. Was it all in vain?

I don’t think it was. What my father and the other courageous warriors did was meaningful in its own right. Moreover, the struggle my father’s life valiantly represented lives on. Today, each of us can help keep the flame for Russian freedom alive and to help the brave Russian people fighting for justice and liberty.

Each of us can also take a stand against the threat of Islamic Supremacism, which has replaced the threat of communism to western civilization today, and we can also resist the leftist agenda, which we know is bent on aiding and abetting Jihad and stealth Jihad.

From a young age, I set out to carry the torch for my dad in terms of everything he stood and fought for. I make that effort today as the editor of David Horowitz’smagazineFrontpagemag.com, which is on the front-lines in exposing our enemies, at home and abroad, and in devising the best strategies to defend our civilization and freedom from them. I also honor my dad’s memory and continue his cause by hosting the web-tv show, The Glazov Gang (with the help of my producer Anni Cyrus), which dares to tell the truth about the Left and Islamic Supremacism that our media and culture simply won’t dare discuss.

I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time here to read about my father. And I am most grateful to all of you who will help, in your own personal way, to try to make sure that my dad’s battle – and the battle of so many freedom fighters and martyrs who rose and fell fighting totalitarian systems — will not be forgotten. Thank you.

To learn more about Yuri Glazov, watch Jamie discuss his family background in the interview with Ann-Marie Murrell , and in Josh Brewster's 2-part series, below:

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Rex Tillerson’s departure from the State Department is an opportunity to correct the fossilized received wisdom that for years has hampered our foreign policy. His replacement, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, seems likely to rejuvenate State by bringing a more realist philosophy to our relations with the world.

From the start Tillerson was a dubious pick to implement the president’s policies, and his differences with Trump were predicated on the same assumptions evident in Barack Obama’s two terms. Obama is the epitome of the globalist idealism that dominates Western political and business elites. In their view, interstate relations and conflicts are best managed with “supranational constraints on unilateral policies and the progressive development of community norms,” as Oxford professor Kalypso Nicolaides put it. This “security community” favors “civilian forms of influence and action,” rather than military, and the “soft power” international idealists regularly tout to create “tolerance between states” and to “move beyond the relationships of dominance and exploitation” by mean of “integration, prevention, mediation, and persuasion.”

Obama’s disastrous foreign policy mirrored these utopian goals, what the New York Times at the beginning of Obama’s presidency identified as a “renewed emphasis on diplomacy, consultation, and the forging of broad international coalitions.” The Times was quoting Obama. In a 2007 Foreign Affairs article, he highlighted the “need to reinvigorate American diplomacy,” and to “renew American leadership in the world” and “rebuild the alliances, partnerships, and institutions necessary to confront common threats and enhance common security.” These goals, moreover, required toning down expressions of American exceptionalism, which he recommended in 2009, and participating in global affairs “not in the spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner–– a partner mindful of his own imperfections.”

Obama’s two terms reflected these recommendations. His foreign policy was one of American retreat and “leading from behind.” The results were disastrous. The abandonment of Iraq created a vacuum which was filled by Iraq, Russia, and ISIS, followed up by the gruesome civil war in Syria and the ongoing slaughter and refugee crisis continuing today. The misguided “multinational” NATO adventure in Libya, ostensibly to protect civilians, instead led to the collapse of political order, the proliferation of jihadi outfits, and the flooding of the region with weapons from Gaddafi’s arsenals, which in turn set the stage for the murder of four Americans in Benghazi. Most dangerous was the nuclear deal with Iran, the fruit of Obama’s emphasis on “diplomacy, consultation, and the forging of broad international coalitions.” The outcome of this leap of faith has been the financing of Iran’s terrorist regime, and enough breathing space for the mullahs to move closer to their goal of nuclear-armed missiles.

Trump was elected in part because he rejected this shop-worn internationalism and its shibboleth of “soft power.” It was strange, then, that he made Tillerson his Secretary of State. As CEO of Exxon-Mobil, Tillerson comes from a world of global business and political elites, where consultation and negotiation––deal-making, not violence––are the mechanisms of doing business. There is no indication from his words and deeds that Tillerson grasped the immense global diversity in cultures, mores, values, and beliefs that are the roots of state action, and that make the “international community” a delusion useful for global commerce and the dogmas of collectivism. He seemed not to take into account that agreements and treaties are not expressions of international “community norms,” but of national self-interest and ideological passions. For most nations, even our so-called “friends and allies,” diplomacy is weaponized in order to serve interests and passions that are radically different from, and often inimical to, our own.

On Tillerson’s departure he said something that expressed this misguided idealism: “U.S. leadership starts with diplomacy.” No, U.S. leadership starts with prestige, our credibility with friends and enemies alike that we will use our immense military and economic power to help our friends and hurt our enemies. Diplomacy without “swords,” to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, are “mere words.” The sincere belief that we will use mind-concentrating force against those who seek to damage our own security and interests is the necessary precondition for successful diplomacy. Without that belief, diplomacy, negotiated agreements, talks, and summits become the means for our rivals and enemies to achieve their own aims on the cheap––and for feckless politicians to create the illusion of doing something when the political cost of action is too high.

The two main points of disagreement between Tillerson and Trump focused on differences in foreign policy philosophy. Tillerson and others wanted to stay in the Paris Climate Accords because “we” had agreed to them, and it would hurt our credibility if we withdrew and thus appeared indifferent to the coming global-warming apocalypse. This is the stale and dishonest argument the Democrats used against George W. Bush when he didn’t sign the Kyoto Accords. But such executive decisions are not made by “We the people.” A treaty confirmed by the Senate, those more directly accountable to the people, creates a binding obligation. And even then, any sovereign nation can leave any treaty, which is why NATO and the EU have in their treaties provisions for withdrawal.

And Trump had good reasons for withdrawing. Like its numerous ineffectual predecessors, the Paris Accords had little to do with alleged catastrophic global warming. Its modest goal of a 2˚ Celsius reduction in temperatures by 2030 was already out of reach by the time Trump took office, and even if achieved would have barely reduced the projected warming. This will not surprise anyone who knows that the whole history of “global warning” has been driven by political and economic interests that came before the “science” (see Rupert Darwall, The Age of Global Warming). And those interests are inimical to our own, especially the hit to our economy that such policies would inflict, as Obama’s “war on carbon” illustrated during his tenure.

That’s why Obama didn’t present the Paris Accords as a treaty requiring two-thirds of the Senate, who being subject to the ballot-box had no more interest in such a costly fraud than the Senate did in 1997, when it voted 97-0 not even to consider the Kyoto treaty. Nor is Trump’s withdrawal damaging to our “strength” or prestige, but rather the opposite: a signal to allies and enemies that we will not damage our own interests just to get some international plaudits for hewing to the global received wisdom about the dubious theory of human-caused catastrophic climate change.

Much more dangerous is Tillerson’s support for the nuclear agreement with Iran that Trump during his campaign roundly denounced and promised to scuttle. Tillerson publicly expressed his preference for the option to “stay in the deal and hold Iran accountable to its terms,” which he said would require Iran to act as a “good neighbor,” a bit of naïveté dangerous in a Secretary of State. The Iran “agreement” also was not submitted to the Senate as a treaty to be approved or rejected by the people’s representatives, bespeaking Obama’s distrust of the citizens. As a result, an anti-Semitic, genocidal, theocratic regime, the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism and up to its elbows in American blood, was given in cash and sanctions-relief a multi-billion-dollar reprieve from accelerating economic collapse, and a clear road for achieving its aims of acquiring nuclear weapons deliverable by long-range missiles.

This suicidal act of appeasement was justified, at least publicly, by the same old nostrums of idealistic internationalism that motivated Neville Chamberlain in Munich. In a 2015 speech justifying the deal, Obama employed all the worn-out tropes of a “postmodern” foreign policy and its fetish for “soft power.” He praised “our ability to draw upon new U.N. Security Council resolutions” and “hard, painstaking diplomacy––not saber-rattling, not tough talk”; and he decried “military action” which “would be far less effective than this deal in preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” relying on the specious argument that all-out war is the only effective use of force.

And he promoted the goal of reintegrating Iran into the international community, claiming that “the majority of the Iranian people have powerful incentives to urge their government to move in a different, less provocative direction––incentives that are strengthened by this deal.” If Iran takes that chance, “that would be good for Iran, it would be good for the United States. It would be good for a region that has known too much conflict. It would be good for the world.” Of course, this is the same Obama who in 2009 sat on his hands when brave Iranians protested against the corrupt, brutal mullocracy, and who thinks that giving fanatics and murderers nuclear weapons will normalize their government rather than empower their aggression.

Tillerson’s replacement, Mike Pompeo, has been clear in his hawkish public statements that the Iran deal is failing and should be rejected: “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state-sponsor of terrorism.” Unlike Tillerson, he has a good relationship with the president, with whom he communicates frequently. One hopes that he will remind Trump that “deal-making” prowess in the business world is light-years from negotiations with state rivals and enemies, where force or a credible threat of lethal force is the sine qua non. He may also encourage Trump to make his policy actions match his campaign rhetoric, and unlike Tillerson, discard a failed foreign policy idealism predicated on naïve internationalism and a fetish for verbal processes. His appointment will be a big step toward undoing the manifold foreign policy failures Obama left in his wake.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

I’ll be baaaaack.

Arnold Schwarzenegger washed out of Hollywood. When he got into the California gubernatorial recall election, he was outrunning a string of bombs like Collateral Damage, 6th Day and Batman and Robin.

After he failed in politics, leaving behind a badly mismanaged state and a sex scandal, he went back to Hollywood. And he failed even harder. The Last Stand had a $45 million budget. It made $12 million in the states. Sabotage had a $35 million budget and made only $17 million worldwide.

Killing Gunther went straight to video.

So Arnold went right back into politics. Unlike the private sector, failure in politics doesn’t matter. He went into politics calling Democrat opponents “girlie men” and he went out as the “trophy wife” of the Democrats and their special interests. The vain celebrity selfishly exploited a political revolution that might have saved California, but instead handed it over to the bankruptcy of permanent Dem rule.

After washing out of Hollywood again, Arnie is doing a brisk tour of the Dem circuit.

His Terminate Gerrymandering Crowdpac's cause is supported by Eric Holder's National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Terminate’s site takes you to its brief posted on Common Cause’s site. Common Cause has received over a million from George Soros and its board is chaired by Robert Reich, the radical lefty activist and former Clintonite. Common Cause claims to have coordinated the Schwarzenegger brief. Reed Smith, the firm that drafted Arnie’s brief, is a Democrat firm that was accused of voter suppression for its role in removing Nader from the ballot in Pennsylvania.

The brief begins by claiming that Schwarzenegger, Kasich, and other “former governors—from both major political parties—who have witnessed firsthand how partisan gerrymandering in their States has robbed citizens of full participation in the democratic process.” The irony is overwhelming.

Schwarzenegger boasts of presiding over “election reforms” that left California a one-party state. Kamala Harris, the Great Obama Hope of 2020, won what amounted to a Democrat primary against a fellow Dem. Reed Smith is most famous for helping Dem staffers working on the taxpayer dollar hound a third party candidate off the ballot by challenging a voter who signed his name as Bill instead of William.

“I’m a Republican, and I’m a true Republican, and I will always be a Republican,” Arnie declared.

And if you don’t believe that, last year Arnold and the Schwarzenegger Institute and Common Cause hosted David Daley, the former editor of the radical lefty site Salon, to discuss his book, Ratf**ked, which accuses Republicans of a “Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy”.

The brand of democracy that Arnie is peddling “terminates” democracy and Republicans. Its great dream is to turn the rest of the country into an undemocratic one-party state. Just like California.

But now the great Hummer collector has found a new cause: suing oil companies over global warming.

“It’s absolutely irresponsible to know that your product is killing people and not have a warning label on it, like tobacco,” he complained. “Every gas station on it, every car should have a warning label on it.”

If only someone had told Arnie that his four Hummers, his Bugatti Veyron, his Porsche 911 Turbo, Ferrari 360 Spider, Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and his M47 Patton Tank were bad for the environment. And then there was the time that he tried to promote his bomb, The Last Stand, by crushing a car with his tank. Why didn’t the oil companies tell him that was bad for the environment? There shoulda been a label.

It was actually Schwarzenegger’s obsession with getting a Humvee for his collection that made the Hummer happen. But just because he can drive one, doesn’t mean you should.

And he’ll be hosting an environmental conference in Vienna. How will he get there?

There is his Gulfstream III jet. He bought the $35 million jet to commute from his Brentwood mansion in Los Angeles to the capital in Sacramento. Instead of moving to Sacramento, he chose to fly back and forth. The trip allegedly did as much damage to the environment in an hour as a car does in one year.

"Did you know that air-drying your clothes for six months saves 700 pounds of carbon dioxide?” he had lectured Californians. A private jet like Arnie’s could churn out 90,000 pounds on a cross-country flight.

But go on air-drying your clothes while he jets around to Europe to save the planet from people like you.

The environmental conference will be another event by Schwarzenegger’s R20 organization. What has R20 aka the Austrian World Summit accomplished? It keeps Arnie relevant. In 2011, the Hollywood Reporterdescribed the “disgraced ex-governor” telling an environmental conference, “I’ll be back.”

As Al Gore reminds us, when you’ve failed at everything else, you can always be an environmentalist.

The failed actor quickly grasped the essential hypocrisy of progressive politics. And that has defined him.

There was an awkward moment when Arnold Schwarzenegger was asked about #MeToo. Back when he first ran for office, multiple women had come forward to accuse him of groping and assaulting them.

Arnie had been forced to skip the Common Cause gala thrown by his lefty friends after a threatened protest. Initially he denied the allegations, and then admitted that he might have “behaved badly.”

Now Arnie praised #MeToo, "I think it’s fantastic. I think women have been used and abused and treated horribly for too long." He claimed that the charges against him were "politically motivated," then admitted, "I made mistakes." Then he held some sexual harassment classes. And it was okay.

The media made much of Schwarzenegger’s Twitter denunciation of Trump after the Access Hollywood tape scandal broke. It conveniently forgot how many women had accused Arnie of groping them.

Sexual harassment classes, like carbon offsets, cover a multitude of sins. You can fly your private jet to Europe as long as you preach environmental platitudes. You can have a garage full of sports cars as long as you prevent working class people from walking with their groceries home in a plastic bag. You can grope women as long as you hold sexual harassment classes. And other people will pay the price.

The essence of conservatism is that we should have few rules, but that they should apply to everyone. The essence of the left is that there should be infinite rules which the bosses never have to follow.

Just ask Arnold, Ted and Bill.

The same media industry that pretends to take sexual harassment seriously brings Arnold back so he can deliver a few of his tired lines about “terminating” opponents and ending with, “I’ll be baaaack.”

He’s useful because he provides Republican cover for lefty initiatives like Common Cause and eco-fascism. And some in the audience will still cheer his corny gags even if they won’t pay to see his movies.

Maybe tomorrow or the day after, the reckoning will come. His accusers will get the media spotlight. And the environmental conferences and awards ceremonies will dry up. France will demand its Legion of Honor back. The Schwarzenegger Institute will change its name to the Waldheim Institute. And the oil companies will sue him for not putting a warning label on the cars that he poured their products into.

But then there’ll be another Terminator movie. The last one couldn’t break $100 million in America. And if the next one bombs, he’ll just have to go all the way baaaack into politics.

"If I'd been born in America, I would've run," Schwarzenegger claimed during the last presidential election. Just imagine a national ban on oil and gas for every vehicle except his private jet.

On top of an already failing administration, Southwest High School staff are struggling to maintain peace between students. Last Friday, March 2, multiple fights broke out during the school’s second lunch period. Despite attempts to sweep the issue under the rug and downplay the violence, persistent students and parents forced the administration to address the situation.

Videos of the fight posted online forced the administration to hold an emergency meeting.

The highly anticipated fight between two students who have been off-and-on friends for years became physical during lunch last Friday. According to school officials, they knew of the impending conflict at least a week prior. The day of the incident, the administration claims that they reached out to the students “every hour” before the fight broke out. Unfortunately, the efforts were not successful and the violence erupted anyway.

The fight was not limited to the two students, who were reported by classmates to be a Somali-American and an African American. Over 20 students joined the chaos soon after the first punches were thrown and the original videos that surfaced were titled “Somalis vs. Blacks.” The original videos have been taken down due to pressure from school administration. The school’s resource officer was present in the cafeteria. In an attempt to control the situation, school officials put the cafeteria into lockdown for 15 minutes after the allotted 30-minute lunch period, keeping any students from leaving or entering, including the ones not involved. All staff members that were not otherwise occupied were called to action.

The police were not called, but 15 student resource officers from other schools were called for backup. In an eyewitness video taken by a student, the administration’s inability to diffuse the skirmish in a timely, appropriate, and safe manner was made clear.

As punishment for the students’ actions, hall passes were banned for the rest of the week, bathrooms were locked, staff “runners” were ushering students to the bathroom during class and the upcoming pep-fest was canceled. Many students are frustrated that everyone in the school is being punished for the actions of a few. The teachers and administration refuse to discuss students’ concerns over the incident even if they no longer feel safe at school.

On Thursday, March 8, the Southwest Community meeting, originally planned to focus around other issues at the school, was refocused to address Southwest’s culture. Approximately 250 students, parents, staff and concerned members of the community attended the meeting held by Minneapolis Public Schools district administration.

To start the meeting off, the area superintendent, Carla Steinbach, introduced herself and the goals of the meeting.

“We have to be okay with non-closure because tonight might be the first of many meetings. I’m hoping it is actually, it could be an opportunity,” Steinbach said.

The superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools, Ed Graff, was not present at the meeting Thursday night. Tara Fitzgerald, the assistant principal of Southwest explained the situation.

“During the middle of B-lunch, we have three lunches--A, B, and Ca fight broke out between two students. Specifically, two at the far end of the lunchroom and as they started fighting, other students got into the fight to support their friends in that fight. Staff was present throughout the entire lunch,” Fitzgerald said.

Many parents voiced their opinions on how the situation was handled.

“[My daughter] does not feel safe at school right now, and canceling the pep-fest, not having passes, and sitting at lunch are not long-term solutions and it is not fair to the vast majority of students who are doing their jobs,” one mother said.

All of the speakers from the school district were quick to dismiss any assumptions that the altercation was racially motivated. Many parents disagreed with the school staff due to video evidence and reports from their children.

Although problems with racial tensions were denied, the speakers continued focus on the issue of race. The tone remained the same for the rest of the meeting. There were no concrete answers and the only solutions offered other than punitive actions imposed on the entire student body were “restorative practices” instead of consequences directed at the two perpetrators.

The Broward Education Foundation (BEF) has set up a fund to assist the survivors and the families of the victims of last month’s Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, which took the lives of 17 innocent students and faculty. The fund has accepted money from many sources, including a group, the South Florida Muslim Federation, that acts as an umbrella organization for a number of smaller groups, many of which have numerous links to terrorism and bigotry.

On March 5th, the Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) Superintendent Robert Runcie and BEF Executive Director Shea Ciriago held, up high, a check containing the South Florida Muslim Federation (SFMF) logo for $15,668. The money was raised via a page set up by SFMF on the crowdfunding site, LaunchGood. A dozen Muslim associates from the group came for the photo op and to present the check.

A page on the SFMF website has been created to publicize the check presentation. On it are mentioned a number of SFMF groups that helped coordinate the raising of the funds. They include: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), Islamic Relief (IR), and the Islamic Foundation of South Florida (IFSF).

CAIR was established in June 1994 by operatives from Hamas, including then-global leader of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. In 2007 and 2008, CAIR was named a co-conspirator by the US Justice Department for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. CAIR had used its official website to raise money for the organization on trial, the Holy Land Foundation (HLF). A number of CAIR officials have been placed in prison and/or deported from the US for terror-related activity. In August 2014, the Executive Director of CAIR’s Florida chapter, Hassan Shibly, tweeted, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of God...”

ICNA was founded in September 1968 as the American affiliate of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), South Asia’s largest Islamist group. JI’s militant wing, Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), owned the Pakistani compound where Osama bin Laden was living and eventually killed in. ICNA, itself, has been linked to terrorist financing and has used the internet to promote terror organizations, including Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In November 2013, former ICNA Secretary General, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, was sentenced to death for his role in the murders of 18 people as a death squad leader during Bangladesh’s 1971 War of Independence.

Islamic Relief (IR) was founded in the UK in 1984. The Russian government has accused IR of supporting terrorism in Chechnya. Israel has banned the group, labeling it a Hamas front and arresting the organization’s Gaza Program Manager, Ayaz Ali, in May 2006, for providing assistance to Hamas. At the end of 2014, Britain’s HSBC bank cut ties with IR over concerns about “terrorist financing.” Reports show that IR has sent millions of dollars to and received tens of thousands of dollars from groups related to al-Qaeda. The Chairman of the US office of IR, Khaled Lamada, has used social media to advocate for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

IFSF was established in September 1989. IFSF’s Youth Director, Abdur Rahman al-Ghani, has a Facebook page littered with anti-American, anti-Jewish and Islamic supremacist language and images. In December 2012, he wrote, “Zionist/Israelis… are demonic and the most evil on earth.” In March 2012, he posted a graphic stating, “ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD.” And in February 2012, he posted a bloodied CIA logo with the caption, “Wiping out the CIA.” In April 2014, IFSF hosted a talk by Mazen Mokhtar, a former administrator for an al-Qaeda recruitment website who has pledged his support for Hamas and suicide bombings.

These organizations are only a small sample of the terror-related groups that are part of the South Florida Muslim Federation, but they are more than enough to say that the funds the Broward Education Foundation received should be returned. To keep this money – to be precise, ‘blood money’ – only serves to legitimize these organizations and their poisonous histories.

Worse still, it generates a façade for these groups making them appear benign, so they can promote their radical agendas with impunity. This author warned against the cynical exploitation of the Parkland massacre by terror-tied Islamist organizations.

The South Florida Muslim Federation is a conglomerate of groups, whose associates continue to cause destruction worldwide. Broward should have nothing to do with these organizations or their money.

No one should help victims of violence with funds that are tainted by violence.

During this Lenten season when Christians are preparing themselves for Easter Sunday, those of us who are living in relative peace and affluence should remember and pray for those brothers and sisters in the faith whose circumstances are not as friendly.

To put it more accurately, Christians the world over should be mindful that at this time in our history there remain legions of Christ’s disciples who are made to endure persecution for their faith the likes of which rival that suffered by the earliest Christians.

While most of the worst environments for Christians are Islamic lands, there are non-Islamic bastions of intense Christian persecution that receive little to no coverage by the world’s media. One particularly notable example is that of India.

Of a population of 1.3 billion people, there are 64 million Christians who reside in India. Open Doors, an organization “dedicated to serving persecuted Christians worldwide,” relays the story of “Reena,” a 19 year-old girl who experienced this anti-Christian persecution directly.

“When I was a young child,” she says, “Hindu children did not want to play with me.” Eventually, “my parents were banned from using the local water supply. They had to walk many kilometers to draw water from the river.”

Things got even worse for this young woman.

When Reena went to work as a school teacher, she was initially promised a salary of 1,500 rupees ($23.13) a month. Her employers wound up welching: They paid her only 500 rupees ($7.71) for the first two months. Within six months, they stopped paying her entirely. So Reena sought work elsewhere.

Her new headmaster invited Reena to a teachers’ meeting. There he offered her and her colleagues an assortment of Indian pastries.

And it was at this time that Reena was drugged and kidnapped.

Reena doesn’t want to discuss the events that unfolded over the ten days of her captivity. She claims to have no recollection, but those in the know at Open Doors insist that it is more “likely…that what happened to her was so terrible [that] she doesn’t want to share” her experiences. After all, literally “millions of girls in India”—many of them Christians and other religious minorities—“are kidnapped and trafficked each year.”

Reena called her parents at one point and informed them that she was being retained in “a terrible place.” She also admits that when she first awoke, she was in a train car with many other teenage girls who followed her as she made her escape.

Yet Reena expresses suspicions that at least some of the girls were involved in her abduction.

Reena had been taken 14 hours away from her village.

Although she experienced depression and hopelessness for a time following her return to her home, upon attending an inspiring church service, Reena renewed her Christian faith. While her brother informs us that the headmaster in whose company Reena was drugged desires vengeance for the troubles that he now apparently endures, Reena sounds hopeful:

“My future is very bright. I will share the gospel with non-believers. I don’t expect more problems.”

But there are many problems for India’s Christians.

Over the last three years, the anti-Christian persecution in India has continued to increase. Open Doors’ World Watch List ranked India as the planet’s 25th worst persecutor of Christians in 2015. Yet in 2017 it was found to be the 15th biggest persecutor and, this year, it climbed to 11th place.

An Open Doors spokesperson informs us that before Christians face overt physical violence—in 2016, 15 Christians were murdered in India and many more beaten and threatened—“there [is] often…a long process of ‘re-converting’ them to Hinduism, during which they faced discrimination, social exclusion and other types of pressure.”

A chief cause of the oppression, according to Open Doors, is the resurrection of Hindu nationalism. The Hindu nationalist holds that only Hinduism should be observed in India. Some political leaders have even gone so far as to call for the expulsion from India of all Christians and Muslims by 2021.

In any event, although “everyone” is aware that “the churches are being attacked and demolished on almost an everyday basis in India,” as an Open Doors representative puts it, the Prime Minister of the country denies that any such persecution is occurring.

Chandan and her husband, Aadarsh, an Indian man who converted to Christianity and became a pastor who led a couple of dozen animists to Christ, have four children. The oldest, a daughter, is married, while the other three were away at boarding school when the unthinkable occurred.

Chandan and Aadarsh were home alone when they were attacked by thirty men, Maoist (communist) Naxalites all of them. As they grabbed him and proceeded to drag him outside, they were promising to murder Aadarsh. Chandan clung to her husband, begging the thugs to kill her along with her husband. Instead, though, they delivered to her a hard blow to the shoulder, dropping her to the ground.

The last thing Chandan recalls having heard is the loud sound of the door slamming shut as her husband was led off into the jungle to be killed.

Shortly afterwards, Aadarsh’s corpse was found.

None of the Christians who Aadarsh had converted attended his funeral for fear of losing their lives, and Chandan, fearing future attacks, fled her home and village with nothing but “the clothes on her back,” as Open Doors reports.

As if it wasn’t terrible enough that the Naxalites murdered Aadarsh. They subsequently threatened his brother Ajay. In fact, prior to Aadarsh’s murder, the Naxalites abducted Ajay’s son.

Of course, none of this should come as any surprise when it is considered that over the last decade, this same treacherous group, “with the help of local authorities,” has “attacked, beaten, kidnapped, raped and killed thousands of Christians in India” (italics added).

It’s worth noting that when Chandan was asked by Open Doors whether the trauma to which she and her loved ones have been subjected has provoked her to reconsider her faith and denounce Christ, she promptly responded:

“I’d rather die.”

Hindu-on-Christian persecution—not something that we hear, or are likely to hear, talked about by the Western media that has labored tirelessly to depict Christians as the planet’s only purveyors of oppression.